The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth was something of a national institution. It was opened by Christopher Robin Milne, son of A A Milne, who was made the central character of his father’s Pooh books. Christopher strongly resented his father’s action which caused him embarrassment throughout his life.

It was good for business, however. Many people visited the shop just for the pleasure of meeting the real Christopher Robin, even though Christopher would often hide when he heard his name mentioned. He ran the shop very successfully for thirty years until his retirement.

The shop continued to trade until last year. I blogged about its closure in November.

It is now clear that wasn’t the end of the story. There are a lot of people in Dartmouth who aren’t prepared to live without a shop in the town selling new books. They launched a fund-raising operation and the result is that the town now has The Community Bookshop.

Andrea Saunders, who worked in the Harbour Bookshop for twenty-six years, is in charge of stock control and the shop is staffed by volunteers. The new shop is at 12 Higher Street. It’s smaller and much less expensive than the old one, but attractively fitted out.

I hope their experiment works and proves an example to be followed by many of the other towns that have lost their bookshops.

If you holiday in South Devon this summer, please visit Dartmouth, seek out the shop – and buy something!

We all know that western capitalist economies are in a mess – and many of us have very firm views on who was responsible for generating the problems. Most of the population are suffering as a result of the failures; some are paying a very heavy price with job losses and/or repossession of their homes: others are facing a less drastic reduction in their standard of living. You know things are really tough when booksellers suffer; books are inexpensive items and when buyers feel that they have to cut back on such inexpensive indulgencies we are in real trouble.

I know that the smaller booksellers are suffering, because I talk to them. I haven’t yet seen any ‘official’ announcement from Waterstones about Christmas figures, but one of its staff commenting on The Bookseller forum about the decision to change the font and drop the apostrophe from the name said, ‘We have just had an absolutely terrible Christmas…’

We won’t see a sustained recovery until the major problems in the eurozone have been resolved. At the moment the focus is on Greece, but if that country defaults I can’t help feeling that we will see a domino effect as Italy, Portugal and Ireland take their turn in the spotlight. The Greeks now seem to be very close to defaulting on their loans, withdrawing from the euro and reverting to the drachma – which they only abandoned nine years ago.

The creation of the eurozone was a political exercise, not one based on sensible economics. Trying to force such diverse economies as Germany and Greece to share a common currency was never going to work. Economists outside the eurozone said so repeatedly; Nigel Lawson, for example, has never stopped saying it. But opposition inside the zone was suppressed by the enthusiastic, empire-building politicians who somehow found enough tame bankers and civil servants to push through the plan.

Now that the wheels have really come off the Greek economy they have dropped the elected Prime Minister and in desperation their politicians have appointed Lucas Papademos as an unelected replacement. Presumably they did this on the basis that the politicians had made such a mess of things that they couldn’t see a way out and have therefore placed the country’s future in the hands of an economic genius whose expertise will see them through.

So who is this economic super-hero? Papademos was the Governor of the Bank of Greece in 2001 when Greece somehow convinced the rest of Europe that its economy was meeting the joining requirements imposed upon it. He subsequently moved on to become Vice President of the European Central Bank and has been at the centre of events as the eurozone fell apart.

In Italy (famously described as having an economy too big to fail and too big to bail out) when they finally decided that they had had enough of the elected (!!!) leader, Silvio Berlusconi, Italian politicians also went for an unelected economic super-hero to save them from the rapidly approaching economic doom. Mario Monti is now unelected Prime Minister – he is also Minister of Economy and Finance.

And what did he do before his new political career? From 1994 to 2005, that crucial period when the dodgy economies were welcomed into the eurozone, he was a European Commissioner. He is described as being ‘international advisor to Goldman Sachs’. Goldman Sachs is the bank that is accused of helping Greece to fiddle the books so that their economy appeared to meet the requirements for joining the eurozone.

Everyone feel that the future of the euro is in safe hands?

In a recent post I commented on the state of the property market and suggested that until the bubble in property prices finally bursts, with further substantial falls in house prices, the UK population is spending so much of its net income on somewhere to live that there isn’t enough spending power left to support a buoyant economy.

Now the Government has announced a plan to ‘help get the property market moving again’. The scheme is designed to enable first time buyers to obtain 95% advances to buy newly-built starter homes by providing lenders with a safety net should they have to sell repossessed homes following defaults by the borrowers. This idea seems so wrong on so many levels that I’m stunned by it.

Firstly, it seems basically immoral to enourage vulnerable first time buyers to take on a 95% loan when the economic climate makes further property price falls practically guaranteed.

Secondly, what is the sense in supporting only the purchase of new-builds. That does absolutely nothing to free up the blocked property market.

The safety net in the scheme protects the lender at the expense of the borrower and the tax-payer. So once again the tax-payer will be paying the price of bailing out the lenders – who are the culprits in the whole property bubble disaster with their unrestrained lending. Remember the enthusiasm they had for those mortgages with borrowers self-certifying their own income levels? Reckless lending fuelled an exposion in property prices that was bound to end in disaster. When the bubble really bursts it is the lenders who should bear the costs, not the taxpayers who are still funding bonus payments to the pigs-at -the-trough bankers.

We are lucky to have The Torbay Bookshop in our area. The owners, Matthew and Sarah Clarke, opened for business in 1993. They had spent their working lives in publishing and had built a lot of useful connections. Their first shop was opened by Sir Patrick Moore and when they later moved to a bright new shop in 2002 that one was opened by Dick Francis.

Over the years they have kept up a steady flow of celebrity events, been heavily involved with the local Library Service and won a host of awards, including Best Independent Bookshop. It is hard to think of anything more that the Clarkes could have done to make selling books on the High Street successful.

It was, therefore, distressing to learn that the business (including the freehold of the property) was up for sale. It seemed that an excellent bookshop was in danger of closing.

But there is good news! It has to be said that good news for independent bookshops is in pretty short supply. Matthew and Sarah heard that the neighbouring Thorntons store was closing and stepped in. By re-arranging their premises they can maintain the bookshop, but also offer the range of Thorntons chocolate and, for good measure, they will also be selling jigsaws, stationery, CDs, DVDs, local photographic prints, diaries and calendars.

It’s a relief that we are not losing our local asset, but I can’t help feeling that it’s a pity that such knowledgeable and enthusiastic people can no longer make an adequate living from selling books.

When are the mainstream publishers going to wake up to the fact that unless they change their ways there will soon be very, very few independent bookshops; they will have lost an important sales route and we will have lost a socially significant presence from our High Streets. The solution is obvious. They have to do just two things: stop giving the online retailers and the large chains such generous discounts that it makes it easy for them to undercut the small independents, and stop unloading remaindered stock at obscenely low prices.

I was in a bookshop in Ashburton shortly before it closed down. The proprietor showed me a book that she had on sale at the cover price of £20. It was a very attractive, large format, hardback book featuring a stunning collection of local photographs. It had been published just twelve months previously, but she told me that it was already on sale in a nearby out-of-town shopping centre for just £5. The publisher had never offered the book to the bookshop on reduced terms, but had simply unloaded all the unsold stock in a way that undermined all the independent bookshops in the area.

If a business treats its connections with such contempt it will eventually pay the price.